The Street Vendor Who Sold Connection
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In a Chinese city once famed for porcelain fit for emperors, the biggest draw today isn’t a museum but a man with a frying pan. For ten years, a street vendor known as “Chicken-Cutlet Brother” has turned a six-yuan snack into something far rarer: a moment of genuine human connection. His story reveals how, in an age ruled by algorithms, warmth itself has become China’s newest form of currency.
In every country, there’s a place where a small act of kindness becomes larger than itself.
In New York, it might be the saxophonist in the subway who remembers your face.
In Naples, the barista who slips you a free espresso “for luck.”
And in Jingdezhen — the ancient Chinese city once celebrated for porcelain made for emperors — it’s a man who sells fried chicken.There’s no admission fee, no museum ticket, not even a fixed address. Just a food stall beside a middle school, where for ten years a man named Li Junyong has served the same dish — a single golden cutlet, hot and crisp.On this unremarkable street corner, he has built something extraordinary: a quiet exhibition of the city’s soul.
Search for “Chicken Cutlet Brother,” as he’s known online, and your map will lead you to a line that coils around the block — tourists who have traveled hundreds of miles, students on lunch break, livestreamers narrating every minute of the wait. “I came for the thousand-year-old porcelain,” one visitor jokes, “but I’ve queued three hours for a piece of fried chicken. Crazy — but worth it.”
What they’re buying costs six yuan, about eighty cents. What they’re really seeking is something far rarer — a trace of warmth in an automated world, what Chinese social media now calls “emotional value.” And under the same sky once clouded with imperial kiln smoke, a modern riddle is stirring debate across China:Did the city make the Chicken Cutlet Brother, or did the Chicken Cutlet Brother remake the city?
The Secret Sauce Isn’t in the Sauce
“You can turn me down, but you can’t turn down good flavor.”
“You deserve every good thing in this world — including my chicken cutlet.”“You deserve every good thing in this world — including my chicken cutlet.”
Li Junyong, a lean 44-year-old with a voice rasped by years of labor, flips the sizzling chicken with one hand and delivers these lines with the other.
They sound rehearsed, but they aren’t. They’re the spontaneous poetry of a man who’s been speaking to his customers the same way, day after day, for a decade. His stall holds no Michelin stars, but it serves something the algorithms can’t measure: undivided attention and unfiltered praise.
For nine years, Li marinated his chicken fresh each morning. He notices the students’ backpacks, the office workers’ exhaustion, the regulars’ favorite sauces. Here, the transaction isn’t a cold exchange of money for goods — it’s a fleeting, human connection.
Even locals who come regularly aren’t just there to eat. One high-school student says her six-yuan chicken cutlet feels less like food and more like an emotional refill — a small dose of happiness that lasts the whole day.
In an age when automation and standardized service are sweeping the world — from cashier-less stores in Silicon Valley to robot-run restaurants in Shanghai — Li Junyong has chosen the opposite path. His secret formula is precisely what technology has been trying, and failing, to replicate: the warmth of being human.
When a Fried Chicken Vendor Became the Face of a City
The attention spread like wildfire across China’s short-video platforms. Almost overnight, “Chicken-Cutlet Brother” went from a local secret to a national sensation. And just then, the story took a turn that could only happen in China.
Rather than standing idly by, the Jingdezhen Bureau of Culture and Tourism moved quickly. It awarded the street vendor an unlikely title: Cultural Promotion Ambassador of Jingdezhen. For readers unfamiliar with China’s bureaucracy, the title roughly means he became the “accidental mayor” of this thousand-year-old porcelain capital — a kind of people’s envoy, elected not by ballots but by affection.
The symbolism deepened a few weeks later, when Li was invited to sit alongside city officials at an official forum — and to speak. He didn’t deliver a grand marketing speech. Instead, he promised something much simpler: to “strictly ensure food safety.” It was a humble vow, but one that resonated. Online, people celebrated him as “the man who spoke six billion’s worth of courage through a six-yuan chicken cutlet.”
The appointment seemed unconventional — even whimsical — but it was, in fact, shrewd. Data from major travel platforms showed that during China’s National Day holiday, bookings to Jingdezhen surged by more than 60 percent, largely driven by the “Chicken-Cutlet Brother” effect. One man’s charisma achieved what million-dollar marketing campaigns could not.
Even international outlets began to cover the craze, and local hotels reported a wave of high-end bookings — tangible proof of emotion turned into economy. Commentators were quick to point out that the partnership signaled a shift in local tourism strategy — from top-down promotion to grassroots storytelling.
As one analyst from The Paper, a leading Chinese outlet, noted:
“Statistically speaking, it’s simply easier for a homegrown internet star to capture public attention than for an official to do so. Their authenticity makes them believable.”
And that authenticity — the warmth, the street-level sincerity — is exactly the new face Jingdezhen hopes to present to the world.
The Economics of Emotion: China’s New Tourism Code
Li is hardly an exception. He represents a growing wave in China’s consumer landscape — an economy increasingly driven by what locals call “emotional value.” In contemporary Chinese culture, the term refers to something beyond price or product: the added worth of being seen, comforted, and momentarily uplifted. As material abundance becomes the norm, and life accelerates under the weight of screens and algorithms, a younger generation has begun to spend — not just on things, but on feelings.
They’re buying small doses of warmth and genuine connection in a world that feels increasingly automated. As one online joke goes, Li’s chicken cutlet costs six yuan — about eighty cents — but it comes with sixty yuan of emotional value and six hundred yuan worth of service. The humor captures a deeper shift in China’s consumption logic: people are not queuing for food so much as for a moment of affirmation — the brief joy of being noticed, respected, and encouraged.
From the open-air barbecue boom in Zibo, fueled by college students and locals sharing goodwill, to the fairytale ice festival in Harbin that “spoils” its visitors with care, a new pattern is emerging. Chinese tourism is moving from sightseeing to scene-feeling — from buying souvenirs to purchasing sensations. “When material abundance reaches its peak,” observed a social trends researcher, “people begin paying for emotion and belonging.”
What unites these phenomena, the analyst added, is that they restore something the age of standardized service has forgotten: human warmth. Visitors no longer feel like data points to be monetized — they feel like guests, genuinely welcomed. The “emotional value” has even spilled over into a small-scale ecosystem of its own. Next to Li’s stand, a vendor selling mung bean soup hung up a sign: “Show your chicken-cutlet receipt — get two yuan off.” His business, too, began to boom. It was a grassroots version of a win-win economy, powered not by policy or capital, but by goodwill.
What Remains, When Everything Else Is Digital
The story of Chicken-Cutlet Brother may seem singularly Chinese, but it holds a mirror to every society wrestling with digital isolation and the quiet erosion of community. In New York, London, or Tokyo, we chase the same small certainties — the barista who remembers our order, the baker who saves us the last loaf, the barber who asks about our mother.
Li Junyong’s stall is simply that longing made visible in China’s vernacular: a reminder that belonging, not consumption, is what truly nourishes us. His success hints at a new kind of competitiveness — one measured not in scale or efficiency, but in empathy.
In an age run by algorithms and capital, human connection has become the rarest resource, and perhaps the most enduring form of capital. Li’s version of entrepreneurship is almost subversive in its simplicity: a kind of human capitalism, where sincerity itself becomes the business model.
For cities around the world wondering how to rebuild trust, how to make progress feel human again, Jingdezhen’s unlikely partnership with its street vendor offers an answer. The future of development may not lie in faster systems or smarter machines, but in the warmth that survives between people — the invisible infrastructure of care. Because in the end, what Li sells is not just chicken.
It’s proof that the smallest gestures of kindness can still outlast the cold logic of automation. And that in a city famous for porcelain — fragile, enduring, made to hold warmth — the truest legacy is not what we craft from clay, but what we keep alive in one another.
